Tough Questions Answered: Pretending Acts 15 is reliable history

 This is my reply to an article from "Tough Questions Answered" entitled 

Commentary on Acts 15 (Jerusalem Council)

Posted: 18 Aug 2017 06:00 AM PDT

In AD 48, some Jewish Christians from Jerusalem come to Syrian Antioch, Paul and Barnabas’ home church. These men from Jerusalem argue that Gentile Christians must be circumcised and adhere to the Mosaic Law if they want to be truly saved.

Which raises legitimate questions such as:

If Paul was the inerrant truth-robot today's fundamentalist Christians think he is, how could his own churches produce legalists of such significant popularity that it took a meeting of Christianity's finest to answer them?  Could it possibly be that the arguments of the Judaizers were far more difficult to answer, than what we can infer from the NT rebuttals to them?

Was Paul such a dolt that despite his establishing churches, he couldn't say enough to keep in check the kind of theological aberration today's inerrantists think is "obviously" heretical?

Paul and Barnabas disagree, so the church in Antioch appoint Paul and Barnabas to go to the mother church in Jerusalem, where they will convene with the apostles and elders there.

Barnabas was personally selected by the Holy Spirit to assist Paul in the Gentile ministry (Acts 13:2), so if a person whose knowledge of Paul was more intimate than anything we could have today, wasn't convinced that Paul had the truth, it is rather immature and presumptuous for today's fundamentalist Christians to act as if the truth of Paul's doctrines is a foregone conclusion. 

The journey to Jerusalem probably takes a month or more, so Paul and Barnabas stop along the way and visit several churches in Phoenicia and Samaria. At each stop, they relay the news that Gentiles are converting in high numbers, and the news is met with great joy.

When they arrive at Jerusalem, they meet with the apostles and elders of the Jerusalem church, along with several other members of the Jerusalem church. Paul and Barnabas describe in detail the conversion of Gentiles during their first missionary journey into Asia Minor.

Paul's stories of conversions need not be considered any more authoritative than the same reports coming from Benny Hinn or Bill Graham.  Smart people realize perfectly well that most such alleged converts aren't true converts. Paul's admission that most of his churches were constituted of intellectually ignorant people and other lower social classes (1st Cor. 1:26) increases the likelihood that something other than appreciation for Paul's intellectual justifications of doctrine is what motivated them to convert. And Paul explicitly admitted God did not want him to preach the gospel in ways the world would deem skillful or wise, because academically persuasive preaching would void the power of the cross,  1st Cor. 1:17.

After they finish speaking, a group of Christians who were formerly Pharisees rise to argue that these Gentile converts must be circumcised and keep the law of Moses. John Polhill, in vol. 26, Acts, The New American Commentary, writes:

    It should come as no surprise that some of the Pharisees had become Christians. Pharisees believed in resurrection, life after death, and the coming Messiah. They shared the basic convictions of the Christians. Because of this they are sometimes in Acts found defending the Christians against the Sadducees, who had much less in common with Christian views (cf. 5:17; 23:8f.). A major barrier between Christians and Pharisees was the extensive use of oral tradition by the Pharisees, which Jesus and Paul both rejected as human tradition. It is not surprising that some Pharisees came to embrace Christ as the Messiah in whom they had hoped. For all their emphasis on law, it is also not surprising that they would be reticent to receive anyone into the fellowship in a manner not in accordance with tradition. That tradition was well-established for proselytes—circumcision and the whole yoke of the law.

On the contrary, if we assume Paul's version of the gospel is what Jesus and James also taught, it is an eye-popping mystery how legalistic Pharisees who think Gentiles must be circumcised to be saved, could possibly be genuine converts to a religious system that preaches the exact opposite.   This is how you solve that mystery:  Christianity in the first century consisted of at least two competing factions; the legalistic Judaizers headed by Peter/James/John, and the non-legalists headed by Paul.  Inerrantist attempts to reconcile NT statements about some apostles' legalism, with Paul's law-free gospel, are laughably trifling word-games played by inerrantists who live under a childish sense of black and white certainty.

A lengthy debate ensues, although Luke leaves out the details.

What would your opinion be of an atheist who wrote up an online review of an atheist-Christian debate not otherwise recorded, wherein the atheist reporter represents the Christian position with two sentences, but spends the next few pages giving numerous details for the atheist arguments and how these were approved by other atheists?

Would you say such a reporter appears more interested in spinning history than in fair and balanced reporting?  Luke says nothing more about how the Judaizers argued their case, except a single summary statement (15:1) repeated one time (v. 5), then spends the entire rest of ch. 15 focusing on the apostolic viewpoint.

I say Luke is lying, James was the leader of the Judaizers at that Council (if it even ever happened), and either a) James Peter and John agreed with the Judaizers that Gentile men must be circumcised to be saved, or b) despite viewing Paul as a heretic, they decided in his favor anyway, because giving Paul that much leeway would likely result in Paul sending the Jerusalem church financial donations from the Gentile churches.  You scream about how stupid Mormonism is all day long, but if you were drowning and the only person who could save you was a Mormon lifeguard, how loudly would be you screaming about Mormonism's falsehoods as you are being rescued?

So then, don't discount the historical plausibility of the original apostles believing the material benefits of making Paul part of the club, outweighed the risks of obstinately pointing out his doctrinal errors.

After listening to both sides, Peter, as the leader of the apostles, stands to speak. In verses 7-9, Peter recounts his experience with Cornelius and his household (Acts 10), an event which had occurred some ten years earlier. The Holy Spirit had been given to Cornelius because his heart had been cleansed by faith, not by circumcision or by following the law of Moses. Peter then argues that to require Gentiles to follow the Law would be to challenge God Himself. After all, if God does not require circumcision and Law adherence, then why should the Christian leadership add these burdens to the Gentiles? Peter closes by reiterating that “we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.”

Why don't any of the apostles make the one argument that the canonical gospels indicate would have been the most powerful, namely, that the Judaizers are in error because Jesus preached the gospel to plenty of Gentiles for three years prior and never once required them to get circumcised?  Did not Jesus preach his gospel to Gentiles to the point of causing massive crowds of them to gather around him (Mark 1:45, Matthew 4:15, Luke 5:15, etc)?

Aren't you just a little suspicious about the fact that in Acts 15, the apostolic response avoids resting on the obvious authority of Jesus every bit as much as Paul himself avoids it in his epistles? 

Or maybe the Judaizers were correct, and the reason they started a stir that required a meeting of Christianity's finest is because their arguments were weighty and powerful and that's why Luke never tells us what arguments they made to support their beliefs...had he done so, it would be clear that the the apostolic reliance on shallow OT exegesis and praise reports from newly established Gentiles churches would make the apostles the losers of this Acts 15 debate.  By kepeing the reader from knowing how powerful the Judaizer case can be made, the apostolic response revealed in the text need not be very substantive.

Read what Jesus said and ask yourself whether Exodus 12:48 was a part of the Law at the time:

 17 "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.
 18 "For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished.
 19 "Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
 20 "For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.   (Matt. 5:17-20 NAU)

At the time Jesus said that, the Law excluded Gentiles from covenant with God unless they got circumcised:

 48 "But if a stranger sojourns with you, and celebrates the Passover to the LORD, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near to celebrate it; and he shall be like a native of the land. But no uncircumcised person may eat of it.
 49 "The same law shall apply to the native as to the stranger who sojourns among you." (Exod. 12:48-49 NAU)

Regardless, as long as the canonical gospels continuing having Jesus surrounded with large crowds, fundamentalists are going to look stupid insisting that by some miraculous accident, Jesus never had opportunity to answer the question of whether Gentiles need to be circumcised to be saved.

The whole assembly falls silent until Barnabas and Paul speak up again and describe the miracles that God performed during their mission trip to the Gentiles in Asia Minor.

Sort of like Benny Hinn refuting your accusations of his teaching heresy, because he can allege miracles and conversions in several of his churches.  That phenomena hardly suffices to get him or Paul out of their theological jams.  Any fool can "start a church" and allege "miracles".

James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the elders of the Jerusalem church, now stands to speak.

To clarify, James, a brother of Jesus, who with brother John remained singularly unimpressed with Jesus' miracles (John 7:5).  Unless we count James and John willfully blind idiots, their rejection of their own brother Jesus as Messiah during his physical life justifies the contention that Jesus was an actual fraud...in turn justifying the conclusion that frauds do not rise from the dead.  If James "converted", he only converted to a gospel version that pleased Judaizers (Acts 21:20), and then there's no reason to believe he took the Christian religion any more seriously than Benny Hinn.

James makes the case that Peter’s experience with Cornelius is a precise fulfillment of prophecy.

Once again, under inerrantist assumptions, it is shockingly unexpected that a brother of Jesus who became leader over the Jerusalem church, should think making questionable interpretation of the OT is the best way to resolve a circumcision issue that Jesus himself surely had ample opportunity in three years of preaching to resolve.  What would you think of a Christian apologist who argued that Psalm 16 was a sufficient proof that Jesus rose from the dead, and then never quoted anything in the NT to substantiate Jesus rising from the dead?

Regardless, the fact that Peter feared the legalistic "men from James" (Gal. 2:12) despite knowing James personally, argues he knew their legalism was a correct representation of James' own doctrinal position...and this being so, Luke is lying in Acts 15:24, the real true and legalistic James likely did authorize emissaries to travel to Antioch to impose the circumcision requirement on Gentile converts.

Darrell Bock, in Acts, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, explains that “James’s quotation matches Amos 9:11–12 LXX with material in verse 18 from Isa. 45:21. Jeremiah 12:15 may be the source for the opening ‘After these things I will return,’ but this is less than clear, since the phrases may be only a transition into the citation that shows how James sees the timing.”

Once again, the Jewish apostles on Acts 15 appear suspiciously Pauline in how they avoid the obvious authority of Jesus in favor of resting their conclusions about important matters on how they interpret the OT.  James said nothing of the sort, this is just Luke putting words in James' mouth to make it appear that the mother church spoke and taught more like Paul than they actually did.

Bock adds:

    The reference to the prophets is important. James’s point is not just about this one passage from Amos; rather, this passage reflects what the prophets teach in general, or what the book of the Prophets as a whole teaches. Other texts could be noted (Zech. 2:11; 8:22; Isa. 2:2; 45:20–23; Hos. 3:4–5; Jer. 12:15–16). James is stressing fulfillment, for the prophets agree with what Peter has described.

 But it is more likely, under inerrantist-assumptions, that James knew that Jesus taught against the Judaizer position.  So the apostolic failure here to rely on the obvious authority of Jesus remains a problem inerrantists cannot resolve in terms of historical plausibility or probability.

This is not an affirmation of analogous fulfillment but a declaration that this is now taking place.

...which makes the account all the less believable.  How could Gentile salvation be such a post-resurrection development like this (i.e., "now" taking place), if the canonical gospels are correct in representing Jesus as having a mix of Jewish and Gentile followers (Matthew 4:15, etc)? 

God had promised Gentile inclusion; now he is performing it. Paul cites a string of OT texts on this theme in Rom. 15:7–13.

Common sense says if the prophets predicted Gentile inclusion, the fulfillment was Christ's own mission to the Gentiles:

 12 Now when Jesus heard that John had been taken into custody, He withdrew into Galilee;
 13 and leaving Nazareth, He came and settled in Capernaum, which is by the sea, in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali.
 14 This was to fulfill what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet:
 15 "THE LAND OF ZEBULUN AND THE LAND OF NAPHTALI, BY THE WAY OF THE SEA, BEYOND THE JORDAN, GALILEE OF THE GENTILES--
 16 "THE PEOPLE WHO WERE SITTING IN DARKNESS SAW A GREAT LIGHT, AND THOSE WHO WERE SITTING IN THE LAND AND SHADOW OF DEATH, UPON THEM A LIGHT DAWNED."
 17 From that time Jesus began to preach and say, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." (Matt. 4:12-17 NAU)

 The presentation in Acts that Gentiles are "now" being included, clashes in bright sparks with the canonical gospel presupposition that inclusion of Gentiles was already established.

The prophets predicted that the Gentiles would be added to God’s people. They would be added when the house of David was restored. The house of David was rebuilt in Jesus of Nazareth, the descendant of David and long-awaited Messiah. Bock notes that the

    goal of this rebuilding work is to allow the rest of humanity, not just Jews, to seek God. This fulfills not only the promise to David about his line but also a commitment to Abraham that through his seed the world would experience blessing (Gen. 12:3; Acts 3:25–26; Gal. 3). Thus James argues that this Gentile inclusion is part of the plan of Davidic restoration that God through the prophets said he would do. The prophets affirm what is taking place now. So both divine events and Scripture sustain the church’s inclusion of Gentiles.

Just one problem:  Luke doesn't tell us about 99% of the Judaizer response, so just how acceptable other Christians found this questionable use of the OT will never be known.  Indeed, it would be reasonable to conclude that the Judaizers cited to Jesus' words to substantiate their position, so much that Luke could not have honestly recorded their response without making the apostles look as willfully stupid as humans are capable of being.

In James’ opinion, the Gentile converts need not be circumcised nor follow the law of Moses to be saved.

An issue he'd never have needed to comment on if the apostle's message was doctrinally the same as the message of Jesus.  If Jesus preached Gentile salvation without circumcision and the apostles followed suit, how could legalistic Pharisees ever attain sufficient status in the new church that their legalistic and false view requires a meeting of Christianity's finest in order to root out?

How about a Mormon who "converts" to Mormonism, but retains her prior distrust in Mormon doctrine?

He agrees with Peter that salvation is now by faith in Christ. But the problem remains that the Gentile converts, since they are new followers of Yahweh, are falling prey to the pagan religious institutions to which they once belonged.

At some point you have to get realistic about God's responsibilities, and acknowledge that some sinners fail because God doesn't do His part as promised.  Stop viewing God as so perfect.  If Copan and Flannagan are correct that OT authors frequently employed language of exaggeration when describing God's commands for Israel to entirely slaughter other nations, it follows quite reasonably that their high and lofty language about God's unspeakably infinite perfections is likewise just more exaggerated talk, hence, if God is real, he likely has his share of imperfections despite laudatory biblical language to the contrary.  Exaggerated language doesn't count for establishing reality.  God has problems and worries about which solution is best.

James believes that the church in Antioch should be sent a letter which states that Gentiles should “abstain from the things polluted by idols, and from sexual immorality, and from what has been strangled, and from blood.”

Then he must have liked doing things the hard way, because telepathy and teleportation were available to get the job done much more efficiently:

 39 When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; and the eunuch no longer saw him, but went on his way rejoicing.
 40 But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he passed through he kept preaching the gospel to all the cities until he came to Caesarea.
(Acts 8:39-40 NAU)

 9 A vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing and appealing to him, and saying, "Come over to Macedonia and help us."
(Acts 16:9 NAU)

Clinton Arnold, in John, Acts: Volume Two (Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary) explains:

    The focus of the debate now shifts away from the question of what is essential for salvation to one of how to help Gentile believers break away from their idolatrous pre-Christian practices.

The original question is only shifted away from because Luke chose to avoid revealing how the Judaizers responded to these already-unlikely answers from the apostles.

Each of these four instructions relates to dangers associated with involvement in idolatry.

What you don't tell the reader is that despite the importance of this decree, it is textually corrupted.  Metzger says in his Textual Commentary on the NT:

15.20, 29; 21.25

The text of the Apostolic Decree, as it is called, is given at 15.29; it is referred to proleptically in 15.20 and retrospectively in 21.25. The three verses contain many problems concerning text and exegesis: (1) Are Gentiles commanded to abstain from four things (food offered to idols, blood, strangled meat, and unchastity) or from three (omitting either strangled meat or unchastity); and (2) are the three or four prohibitions entirely ceremonial, or entirely ethical, or a combination of both kinds?

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(a) The Alexandrian text, as well as most other witnesses, has four items of prohibition.
(b) The Western text omits “what is strangled” and adds a negative form of the Golden Rule in 15.20 and 29.
(c) Several witnesses omit “unchastity” from 15.20 (so î⁴⁵ [which unfortunately is not extant for 15.29 or 21.25] and eth) and from 15.29 (so Origen, contra Celsum, VIII:29, as well as vg^ms Vigilius and Gaudentius).
The occasion for issuing the Apostolic Decree, it should be observed, was to settle the question whether Gentile converts to Christianity should be required to submit to the rite of circumcision and fulfill other Mosaic statutes. The Council decided that such observance was not required for salvation; at the same time, however, in order to avoid giving unnecessary offense to Jewish Christians (and to Jews contemplating becoming Christians), the Council asked Gentile converts to make certain concessions for prudential reasons, abstaining from those acts that would offend Jewish scruples and hinder social intercourse, including joint participation in the Lord’s Supper.
As concerns transcriptional probabilities, th/j pornei,aj may have been omitted because this item seemed, superficially, to be out of place in what otherwise appeared to be a food law. Although such a consideration may well account for its absence, it is possible that what was intended by the Jerusalem Council was to warn the Gentile believers to avoid either marriage within the prohibited Levitical degrees (Lv 18.6-18), which the rabbis described as “forbidden for pornei,a,” or mixed marriages with pagans (Nu 25.1; also compare 2 Cor 6.14), or participation in pagan worship, which had long been described by Old Testament prophets as spiritual adultery and which, in fact, offered opportunity in many temples for religious prostitution.
Another way to make sure that the list deals entirely with ritual prohibitions is to remove pornei,aj by emending the text. Bentley,²⁹⁵ for example, conjectured that the Apostolic Decree was an injunction to abstain “from pollutions of idols and swine’s flesh (coirei,aj) and things strangled and from blood.” A similar conjecture, intended to

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produce the same dietetic interpretation, is to read porkei,aj²⁹⁶ instead of pornei,aj. But there is no known example of such a word in Greek, and if an example were found it would be an abstract noun (from po,rkoj) meaning “piggishness.”²⁹⁷

Concerning (b), it is obvious that the threefold prohibition (lacking tou/ pniktou/) refers to moral injunctions to refrain from idolatry, unchastity, and blood-shedding (or murder), to which is added the negative Golden Rule. But this reading can scarcely be original, for it implies that a special warning had to be given to Gentile converts against such sins as murder, and that this was expressed in the form of asking them to “abstain” from it – which is slightly absurd!
It therefore appears to be more likely that an original ritual prohibition against eating foods offered to idols, things strangled and blood, and against pornei,a (however this latter is to be interpreted) was altered into a moral law by dropping the reference to pniktou/ and by adding the negative Golden Rule, than to suppose that an original moral law was transformed into a food law.
The alternative to accepting the fourfold decree is to argue, as P. H. Menoud has done,²⁹⁸ that the original text involved a twofold prohibition, namely to abstain from pollutions of idols and from blood, and that to this basic decree respecting kosher foods, î⁴⁵ al added “and from what is strangled,” thus extending the food-law concerning blood to all flesh improperly slaughtered. In the Western tradition the twofold decree was understood to be a moral injunction relating to idolatry and murder, and these witnesses added the prohibition against another major sin, unchastity. Subsequently the injunction concerning the negative Golden Rule was appended to the Western text, which thus extends the moral application far beyond the three

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basic prohibitions. Finally, the text of the great mass of witnesses represents a conflation of several Western expansions of the basic twofold decree.

Attractive though this theory is on the surface, the textual evidence is not really susceptible of such an interpretation. First, there is no manuscript evidence for the hypothetical twofold decree. Menoud does indeed shrink from pressing his conjecture concerning the twofold decree, and is prepared, with Lagrange, to adopt the reading of î⁴⁵ as the original text.²⁹⁹ But such an alternative proposal leaves the text critic with exactly the same problems that confronted him before, namely, how to explain the deletion as well as the addition of certain items in the decree.
Secondly, the fact that in 15.20 pniktou/ precedes kai. tou/ ai[matoj is hardly compatible with the theory that it was added in order to clarify and extend the meaning of ai[matoj.
In conclusion, therefore, it appears that the least unsatisfactory solution of the complicated textual and exegetical problems of the Apostolic Decree is to regard the fourfold decree as original (foods offered to idols, strangled meat, eating blood, and unchastity – whether ritual or moral), and to explain the two forms of the threefold decree in some such way as those suggested above.³⁰⁰
An extensive literature exists on the text and exegesis of the Apostolic Decree. For what can be said in support of the Western text see, e.g., A. Hilgenfeld, “Das Apostel-Concil nach seinem ursprünglichen Wortlaut,” Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie, XLII (1899), pp. 138–149; Gotthold Resch, Das Aposteldecret nach seiner

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ausserkanonischen Textgestalt (Texte und Untersuchungen, N.F. XIII, 3; Leipzig, 1905); A. von Harnack, Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Neue Testament, III (1908), pp. 188–198, and IV (1911), The Acts of the Apostles (London, 1909), pp. 248–263; K. Lake, The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul, their Motive and Origin (London, 1911), pp. 48–60; idem, The Beginnings of Christianity, vol. v, pp. 205–209; J. H. Ropes, The Text of Acts, pp. 265–269; A. C. Clark, The Acts of the Apostles, pp. 360–361; Thorleif Boman, “Das textkritische Problem des sogenannten Aposteldekrets,” Novum Testamentum, VII (1964), pp. 26–36.

Those who have argued in support of the fourfold decree³⁰¹ include Theodor Zahn, Introduction to the New Testament, III (Edinburgh, 1909), pp. 18–22; idem, Die Apostelgeschichte des Lucas (Leipzig and Erlangen, 1921), pp. 523 ff.; William Sanday, “The Apostolic Decree (Acts XV. 20–29),” Theologische Studien Theodor Zahn…dargebracht (Leipzig, 1908), pp. 317–338; idem, “The Text of the Apostolic Decree (Acts XV:29),” Expositor, Eighth Series, VI (1913), pp. 289–305; E. Jacquier, Les Actes des Apôtres (Paris, 1926), pp. 455–458; Hans Lietzmann, “Der Sinn des Aposteldekretes und seine Textwandlung,” in Amicitiae corolla, a Volume of Essays Presented to James Rendel Harris, ed. by H. G. Wood (London, 1933), pp. 203–211; W. G. Kümmel, “Die älteste Form des Aposteldekrets,” Spiritus et veritas [Festschrift Carlo Kundzinš] (Eutin, 1953), pp. 83–98; E. Haenchen, Die Apostelgeschichte, ad loc.; Marcel Simon, “The Apostolic Decree and its Setting in the Ancient Church,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, LII (196–970), pp. 437–460; C. M. Martini, “Il Decreto del Concilio di Gerusalemme,” Atti della XXII Settimana Biblica (Brescia, 1973), pp. 345–355; C. K. Barrett, Australian Biblical Review, XXXV (1987), pp. 50–59.

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James wants to make sure that these Gentiles make a clean break with their past when they embrace the living and true God. The instructions are, therefore, guidelines to assist their growth as believers, knowing full well that the Gentiles will continue to face significant cultural and spiritual pressures stemming from their past immersion in idolatry and ongoing association with family, friends, and coworkers still involved with it. These guidelines are a practical help in the spiritual and moral battle these Gentiles will face.

Sounds like those guidelines are so important, you should have alerted the reader to the fact that textual corruption problems plague such rules.

snip the rest.

Cold Case Christianity: Wallace proves the resurrection of Jesus with blind faith in bible inerrancy.

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity: 

A Brief Review of Explanations Offered for the Resurrection (Free Bible Insert)

Posted: 04 May 2018 01:01 AM PDT

 ...The following brief summary of explanatory deficiencies is excerpted from my book, Cold Case Christianity. I’ve omitted larger observations from the book related to my own case work and experience as a detective; this abbreviated list is merely a summary of the historic observations related to each explanation. A more comprehensive examination is included in the chapter explaining the process of abductive reasoning.  If we begin with a minimal list of evidences related to the Resurrection of Jesus (Jesus died on the cross and was buried, Jesus’s tomb was empty and no one ever produced His body, Jesus’s disciples believed that they saw Jesus resurrected from the dead, and Jesus’s disciples were transformed following their alleged resurrection observations), the following explanations, along with their deficiencies, must be evaluated:

...Were the Disciples Lying About the Resurrection?

1. The Jewish authorities took many precautions to make sure the tomb was guarded and sealed, knowing that the removal of the body would allow the disciples to claim that Jesus had risen (Matt. 27:62–66).

 To the contrary, Matthew 27:62 specifies that one day seperated Joseph of Arimathea's acquisition of the body and the time the guards show up at the tomb,thus a day in which anything could have happened to the body:

 57 When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who himself had also become a disciple of Jesus.
 58 This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate ordered it to be given to him.
 59 And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth,
 60 and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock; and he rolled a large stone against the entrance of the tomb and went away.
 61 And Mary Magdalene was there, and the other Mary, sitting opposite the grave.
 62 Now on the next day, the day after the preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered together with Pilate,
 63 and said, "Sir, we remember that when He was still alive that deceiver said, 'After three days I am to rise again.'
 64 "Therefore, give orders for the grave to be made secure until the third day, otherwise His disciples may come and steal Him away and say to the people, 'He has risen from the dead,' and the last deception will be worse than the first."
 65 Pilate said to them, "You have a guard; go, make it as secure as you know how."
 66 And they went and made the grave secure, and along with the guard they set a seal on the stone.   (Matt. 27:57-66 NAU)

 Wallace continues:

2. The people local to the event would have known it was a lie

Would the people who preserved gospel histories have preserved hostile witness testimony?  Not likely.  Matthew's story about how the Jews bribed the guards to account for the missiing body by saying they were asleep when the disciples stole the body, is not preservation of hostile witnesses, it is fictional propaganda.

(remember that Paul told the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 that there were still five hundred people who could testify to having seen Jesus alive after His resurrection).

remember also that Paul, who said Christ would be of no benefit to those who receive circumcision (Galatians 5:2), was willing to act in defiance of this theological truth whenever he thought lying would make things go easier between him and the Jews (Acts 16:3), despite the fact that in Acts 16:3, Paul surely knew that the Jews there were insisting on circumcision because they thought it was the basis of salvation for the Gentile (Exodus 12:48).  See Paul's willingness to lie about his true theological convictions when in the company of those he knows disagree with him (1st Cor. 9:20-21), a matter that caused Augustine and Jerome to disagree with each other.

3. The disciples lacked the motive to create such a lie (more on this in chapter 14).

 In the context of stealing a physical human body, that might be significant, but I maintain the original reports of Jesus' resurrection consisted solely of visions, which were themselves embellishments upon a gospel whose earlier form said nothing about a risen Christ appearing to anyone (Christian scholarly consensus that Mark 16 ends at v. 8).

4. The disciples’ transformation following the alleged resurrection is inconsistent with the claim that the appearances were only a lie. How could their own lies transform them into courageous evangelists?

The following passage from Acts 9 demonstrates a) after Saul converted and became Paul, he did not face persecution and threats of death fearlessly, he escaped by being lowered in a basket outside the city walls...and we also learn that the original disciples, after their experiences of seeing the risen Christ, would not believe reports that Saul the persecutor had converted, and remained fearful until Barnabas gave them concrete evidence that Saul had really converted, so this is biblical evidence that seeing the risen Christ did not transform them into "courageous evangelists":

 22 But Saul kept increasing in strength and confounding the Jews who lived at Damascus by proving that this Jesus is the Christ.
 23 When many days had elapsed, the Jews plotted together to do away with him,
 24 but their plot became known to Saul. They were also watching the gates day and night so that they might put him to death;
 25 but his disciples took him by night and let him down through an opening in the wall, lowering him in a large basket.
 26 When he came to Jerusalem, he was trying to associate with the disciples; but they were all afraid of him, not believing that he was a disciple.
 27 But Barnabas took hold of him and brought him to the apostles and described to them how he had seen the Lord on the road, and that He had talked to him, and how at Damascus he had spoken out boldly in the name of Jesus.
 28 And he was with them, moving about freely in Jerusalem, speaking out boldly in the name of the Lord. (Acts 9:22-28 NAU)

Wallace continues:

Did the Disciples Hallucinate the Resurrection?

1. While individuals have hallucinations, there are no examples of large groups of people having the exact same hallucination.

But a theory that the apostles experience similar hallucinations in a religiously charged context, is enough to get the cult started, even assuming they didn't share the exact same mental images.

2. While a short, momentary group hallucination may seem reasonable, long, sustained, and detailed hallucinations are unsupported historically and intuitively unreasonable.

Google the Brownsville Revival and Toronto Blessing.  Christians don't even need "visions" to get some bullshit group started.  And the famine of 43 a.d. (Acts 11:28) would motivate many starving individuals to align themselves with groups.   The notion that nothing but true miracles can explain Christianity's start in the first century, is bullshit.

3. The risen Christ was reported seen on more than one occasion and by a number of different groups (and subsets of groups). All of these diverse sightings would have to be additional group hallucinations of one nature or another.

 I don't see the implausibility of one religious fanatic causing others to get caught up in the moment and stand around convincing themselves they are all having the same experience.  Ask any group of fundamentalist Pentecostals to give you the gift and power of the Holy Spirit, and you'll find out rather quickly how 10 different people can falsely convince themselves that they are all having the same religious experience.

4. Not all the disciples were inclined favorably toward such a hallucination. The disciples included people like Thomas, who was skeptical and did not expect Jesus to come back to life.

While such stories might appear to fulfill the criteria of embarrassment, they likely were intended to make the lesson learned, all the more dramatic, and as such, they ARE something a forger would likely invent.  Thomas's doubt gives rise to the "blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed" stuff.  There is literary purpose to stories of apostolic skepticism.

5. If the resurrection was simply a hallucination, what became of Jesus’s corpse?

 It was buried in a common graveyard with other criminals' corpses.  Once again, the lack of a physical body for the early Christians wouldn't prevent them from seeing Jesus in visions (see Revelation 1:1-4).

The absence of the body is unexplainable under this scenario.

On the contrary, the hallucination hypothesis seeks only to explain the sightings.  There's plenty of historical evidence to warrant the other conclusion that the body of Jesus was disposed of in a common graveyard.

Were the Disciples Fooled by an Imposter?

1. The impersonator would have to be familiar enough with Jesus’s mannerisms and statements to convince the disciples. The disciples knew the topic of the con better than anyone who might con them.

2. Many of the disciples were skeptical and displayed none of the necessary naïveté that would be required for the con artist to succeed.

3. The impersonator would need to possess miraculous powers; the disciples reported that the resurrected Jesus performed many miracles and “convincing proofs” (Acts 1:2–3).

4. Who would seek to start a world religious movement if not one of the hopeful disciples? This theory requires someone to be motivated to impersonate Jesus other than the disciples themselves.

5. This explanation also fails to account for the empty tomb or missing body of Jesus.

I'm a skeptic, but I don't put any stock in any imposter-theory.

Were the Disciples Influenced by Limited Spiritual Sightings?

1. The theory fails to account for the numerous, divergent, and separate group sightings of Jesus that are recorded in the Gospels.

No, the theory simply doesn't believe that eveyrthing stated in the bible is true.  We don't need to "account" for all NT evidence anymore than Christians need to "account" for the lost origins of popular fairy tales, to know that they are false.

These sightings are described specifically with great detail.

The gospel authors were good storytellers.

It’s not reasonable to believe that all these disciples could provide such specified detail if they were simply repeating something they didn’t see for themselves.

But its reasonable once you remember that the problematic details were happening in 33 a.d., and had until 50 a.d. to work out the bugs and kinks before putting anything down in writing.

2. As many as five hundred people were said to be available to testify to their observations of the risen Christ (1 Cor. 15:3–8).

You don't have the first clue as to whether Paul knew this by experience or hearsay, yet you continue talking of these "500 witnesses" as if they and what they saw was gospel truth.

Could all of these people have been influenced to imagine their own observations of Jesus?

Yes, read about how 120 people can experience delusions in groups, in Acts 2.

It’s not reasonable to believe that a persuader equally persuaded all these disciples even though they didn’t actually see anything that was recorded.

Let's first establish the veracity of these "500 witnesses" before we start pretending they are the crossbeam holding everything together.

3. This explanation also fails to account for the empty tomb or the missing corpse.

The hallucination hypothesis explains the sightings, not the empty tomb or missing corpse.  Those matters are answered under the theories of embellishment, since by Christian scholarly consensus, Mark is the earliest gospel and he stopped at 16:8, thus the original form of the gospel didn't tell about Jesus "appearing" to anyone, that crap was created later.

Were the Disciples’ Observations Were Distorted Later?

1. In the earliest accounts of the disciples’ activity after the crucifixion, they are seen citing the resurrection of Jesus as their primary piece of evidence that Jesus was God.

That's what they do in the Book of Acts, but this wasn't written until at least 62 a.d., at the earliest, and so the stories of the initial preaching had time to be embellished. 

From the earliest days of the Christian movement, eyewitnesses were making this claim.

Eyewitness also routinely provide alibis for their friends who are in court facing criminal charges.  You never suspected until just now that eyewitnesses might actually lie about something.  You gain nearly nothing by merely pointing out that eyewitnesses preached the resurrection at an early period.  Hell, the gnostics were early too (1st John 4:3), so what?

2. The students of the disciples also recorded that the resurrection was a key component of the disciples’ eyewitness testimony (more on this in chapter 13).

No, Mark was traditionally a student of Peter, and Mark's gospel ends at 16:8 by Christian scholarly consensus.  Apparently, when Peter was preaching in Rome with Mark walking behind him, Peter did not say anything about witnesses actually seeing a risen Christ, since otherwise Mark would surely have recorded such a thing.

3. The earliest known Christian creed or oral record (as described by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15) includes the resurrection as a key component.

 But the risen Christ himself makes his pre-crucifixion teachings the key component, Matthew 28:20.

4. This explanation also fails to account for the fact that the tomb and body of Jesus have not been exposed to demonstrate that this late legend was false.

You also fail to demonstrate that skeptics of Christianity in the days immediately following Jesus' death would have given two shits about the Christian claims enough to bother "exposing" it as false.  You also wrongfully trivialize the possibility that there was criticism, but like much else in early Christianity, records of such have disappeared.  I don't care of Acts has the disciples preaching the bodily resurrection of Jesus within two months after he died, Luke is a liar who embellishes details.

Were the Disciples Simply Telling the Truth?

1. This explanation has only one liability: It requires a belief in the supernatural; a belief that Jesus had the supernatural power to rise from the dead in the first place.

Wrong, that explanation has another liability, that those who believe it, accept as true that which was written by religious fanatics 2,000 years ago, whose identities cannot be established sufficiently to justify trusting them.

Every explanation offered for a particular set of facts has its own set of unique deficiencies. Even a true explanation will suffer from some apparent liability. As a cold-case detective, my cases (even those in which the defendant confessed to the crime following his conviction) have always presented unanswered questions and apparent deficiencies. Jurors were encouraged to make a decision in spite of these deficiencies by selecting the best inference from the evidence: the explanation that best explains the facts of the case while possessing the fewest liabilities.

 This juror gives the following explanation:  Most Christian scholars agree that Mark ends at 16:8, and if true, it means the the original Christian preaching did not say a risen Jesus was seen by anybody.  Christian scholars also agree in majority that Matthew and Luke borrowed substantial amounts of text from Mark, and its no coincidence that these later gospels suddenly come up with richly detailed resurrection narratives.  They certainly didn't get that shit from their source material (Mark).  They were making it up.

With that in mind, it’s important to recognize the deficiency of the Christian explanation: It requires a belief in the supernatural.

 And "supernatural" implies the existence of something whose location constitutes an incoherency: "above" nature, "beyond" nature, or "outside" of time.

For many people, this is a deal killer; this is the reason they simply cannot accept the Christian account.

For this skeptic, the incoherence of religious language is just one reason among many that break the Christian deal with me.  The others are the failure of Christians to make a good case for apostolic authorship of the gospels and the biblical silence toward most of the original 11 disciples of Jesus, when under Christian assumptions, they likely conducted ministries just as successful as Paul's.  I say Luke didn't give a shit about most of the apostles because he knew they left the faith.

But as I’ve written in the past, we cannot begin our investigation of supernatural claims (like the Resurrection) by rejecting supernaturalism from the onset.

 That's your problem:  you claim to be able to make a historical case that Jesus rose from the dead, then you admit that the case cannot be made if the investigator doesn't believe in magic.  FUCK YOU.

We cannot start with our conclusions predetermined.

Then you must have been irrational everytime you strongly suspected, but couldn't immediately prove, that somebody was lying to do.

While the Christian explanation does present a deficiency of sorts, this liability is actually a matter of presupposition rather than evidential sufficiency.

 So let's debate the presupposition.  Before we ask whether God exists, we need a working definition.  You have none.  Your bible says God is inscrutible, you describe him as filling up the universe, that he is "outside of time", that he hears your prayers but doesn't have ears, he speaks without vocal cords, he causes things to happen inside time meaning he somehow transfers back and forth between the dimension of time and the dimension of eternity.  Sorry, you lose.

Answering Apologetics Press and Dave Miller, Ph.D., on god killing children

This is my reply to an Apologetics Press article by Dr. Dave Miller, entitled

Did God Order the Killing of Babies?

by  Dave Miller,Ph.D.

 Skeptics and atheists have been critical of the Bible’s portrayal of God ordering the death of entire populations—including women and children.

Because the more infinite god is, the more options he has to solve sin problems without needing to inflict misery.  If limited sinners, can solve sin problems without mass slaughter, so can "god". 

Appeals to ripple-effect and chaos theory might help you save face, but foists not the least bit of intellectual obligation upon the person criticizing the bible's divine atrocities.  Hence appeal to such wishful speculations do not perform the function of making your fundamentalist position more reasonable than the position of a person who appeals to other dimensions to explain Bigfoot's uncanny ability to evade most attempts at detection.

For example, God instructed Saul through the prophet Samuel to “go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Samuel 15:3-4, emp. added). Other examples include the period of the Israelite conquest of Canaan in which God instructed the people to exterminate the Canaanite populations that occupied Palestine at the time. However, if one cares to examine the circumstances and assess the rationale, the Bible consistently exonerates itself by offering legitimate clarification and explanation to satisfy the honest searcher of truth.

Ok, where does the bible teach that a person of infinite power "didn't have any other way" to resolve a sin problem except to inflict horrific misery on children and infants?   When we bomb cities in war and cannot avoid killing a few innocent people, it's precisely because we are limited in our power and knowledge.  If we have infallible ability to pinpoint where the innocent civilians were and where the guilty enemy combatants were, we would be able to solve the war problem without killing innocent people.

You know, the excuse of imperfection that your infinite god cannot use.

The Hebrew term herem found, for instance, in Joshua 6:17, refers to the total dedication or giving over of the enemy to God as a sacrifice involving the extermination of the populace. It is alleged that the God of the Bible is as barbaric and cruel as any of the pagan gods. But this assessment is simply not true.
 If the critic would take the time to study the Bible and make an honest evaluation of the principles of God’s justice, wrath, and love,

Which the bible says he cannot do unless he first converts to your religion (1st Cor. 2:14), so you are asking of the critic that which your own theology says is impossible.  Sort of like me asking you to lift 5 tons above your head with no other means beyond your personal unaided biological muscular strength.

he would see the perfect and harmonious interplay between them.

That's funny...most Christian scholars don't believe in biblical inerrancy, which means not even most Christian scholars find your fundamentalist "reconciliation scenarios" too convincing.  That is, even if I became a Christian, god still might be telling me that the divine atrocities of the OT truly contradict the divine love preached by Jesus.

God’s vengeance is not like the impulsive, irrational, emotional outbursts of pagan deities or human beings.

Of course not.  For example, when he determined to murder Moses for no specific reason, the wife felt so constrained by the urgent death threat that she used something more dull than a knife, which happened to be nearby, to circumcise her son, the only apparent way God would back the fuck off:

 24 Now it came about at the lodging place on the way that the LORD met him and sought to put him to death.
 25 Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin and threw it at Moses' feet, and she said, "You are indeed a bridegroom of blood to me."
 26 So He let him alone. At that time she said, "You are a bridegroom of blood "-- because of the circumcision. (Exod. 4:24-26 NAU)

You will insist surely there was a reason God wanted to kill, even if the text doesn't express it, but on the contrary, God specifies that he can be incited to harm people "without cause":

 3 The LORD said to Satan, "Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man fearing God and turning away from evil. And he still holds fast his integrity, although you incited Me against him to ruin him without cause. (Job 2:3 NAU)

Miller continues:

He is infinite in all His attributes and thus perfect in justice, love, and anger.

Ok, you are a classical theist.  But Greg Boyd and other conservative Christian scholars reject classical theism and use the bible to substantiate the opposite doctrine of open-theism (i.e., God is limited and makes mistakes).  In other words, the only way I could allow your classical theist presuppositions is if I convert to Christianity and decide that the Christians who advocate for open-theism are wrong. 

Not likely.  In the text of Genesis 6:6-7, God's regret is not toward the sinfulness of man, even if that was historically true.  His regret is toward his own prior choice to have created man.  That is, god is sorry he created man and this means pretty much the same thing the parent means when saying they are sorry they ever chose to have kids.  In both cases, one's confession of personal imperfection is clear.  Hence I deny any bible verses that extol God's power and wisdom, and refuse to read such classical theist concepts into the biblical wording to make the bible agree with classical theism.  The bible's teaching about God's limitations and imperfections cannot be changed merely beaccuse other parts of the bible give a contrary picture.

Therefore I am reasonable to take god at his word, and accept his personal confession of imperfection as the truth about him...and therefore recognize the bible to be full of theological error.  As if 2,000 years of Christian theologians attacking each other didn't already do the job.

Just as God’s ultimate and final condemnation of sinners to eternal punishment will be just and appropriate,

Ok, you aren't challenging skeptics here, you are preaching to the choir.  Rock on.

so the temporal judgment of wicked people in the Old Testament was ethical and fair.

Gee, how easy is it to blindly accept God's perfection in one part of the bible, to justify the conclusion that "surely the judge of the earth will do right" to quell any problems with any other part of the bible?  Like I said, preaching to the choir.  What you say puts no intellectual compulsion on skeptics, nor highlights any logical fallacies in their criticism of the bible-god.

We human beings do not have an accurate handle on the gravity of sin and the deplorable nature of evil and wickedness.

Yes we do.  Those who trivialize the moral wrongness of sin aren't expressing any greater cavalier liberalism than God did when he got rid of David's two death-deserving sins of adultery and murder...by simply waiving his magic wand:

 13 Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." And Nathan said to David, "The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die. (2 Sam. 12:13 NAU)

How high is God's standard of justice?  Put your diapers on!....He requires a whole entire RAM to be sacrificed when a master rapes a slave girl, and by that sacrifice, he forgives the rapist completely:

 20 'Now if a man lies carnally with a woman who is a slave acquired for another man, but who has in no way been redeemed nor given her freedom, there shall be punishment; they shall not, however, be put to death, because she was not free.
 21 'He shall bring his guilt offering to the LORD to the doorway of the tent of meeting, a ram for a guilt offering.
 22 'The priest shall also make atonement for him with the ram of the guilt offering before the LORD for his sin which he has committed, and the sin which he has committed will be forgiven him. (Lev. 19:20-22 NAU)

I therefore soil myself at the thought of the bible-god's infinitely high standard of justice.  Clearly, he thinks the person who steals a pack of bubble gum from the corner store has made themselves worthy of eternally irreversible conscious torture by fire.

Human sentimentality is hardly a qualified measuring stick for divine truth and spiritual reality.

Said the Muslim terrorist to the American mother of three kids.  When idiots get it in their head that their god wants them to commit some horrible act, they necessarily become immune to common sense.

How incredibly ironic that the atheist, the agnostic, the skeptic, and the liberal all attempt to stand in judgment upon the ethical behavior of God when, if one embraces their position, there is no such thing as an absolute, objective, authoritative standard by which to pronounce anything right or wrong.

We don't need any moral to be "absolute" or "objective" in order to remain "reasonable" to foist our subjective morals on others.  I am reasonable to conform to my culture's apathy toward racism, even if no absolute morals exist.  By conforming to my culture, I make my own life far more pleasant...while contradicting my culture's morals could easily lead to me landing in jail or otherwise making my life miserable.
Acting lawfully in effort to make life enjoyable, by definition, is reasonable. 

That logic will not disappear merely because you can carp "who was right, Mother Theresa or Hitler?"  The question blindly presumes there is a way to objectively determine who was right, which means the question is begging the question of the existence of objective morals, when whether they exist is precisely the debate.

As the French existentialist philosopher, Sartre, admitted: “Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist.... Nor...are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior” (1961, p. 485).

He was correct.  And due to the power of cultural and environmental conditioning, intelligent mammals are going to make changes in their lives that cause those who mostly agree on morals to band together in villages, cities, states, and nations. A whole bunch of people think raping a child is immoral, so it doesn't take a genius to figure out why such people choose to group together.  Yes, very often people are uneducated on moral philosophy and do indeed mistake their ultimately subjective morality for absolute morality, but thankfully, I'm not among them.

The atheist and agnostic have absolutely no platform on which to stand to make moral or ethical distinctions—except as the result of purely personal taste.

We don't need to ground our personal moral tastes in objective morality before our employment of those tastes to reach our desired goals can be reasonable and rational.

The mere fact that they concede the existence of objective evil is an unwitting concession there is a God Who has established an absolute framework of moral judgments.

Then you just encountered a rather extreme roadblock: I'm an atheist, I do not concede the existence of objective evil.  I am horrified at news that somebody slaughtered a schoolyard full of kids...but only because I was raised to adopt and reflect my culture's general morality...by parents who did the same.

Had I been born in 1915 in Germany, I might just as easily have taken the view that jewish kids "deserve" to be killed.  Now what are you going to do?  Find fault with a person for growing up to adopt their own culture's morals?  Ok, how about if I find "fault" with a man who grew up as a fundamentalist Christian and now thinks adultery is immoral?  Informed discussion about morality makes it clear that it is wrong to fault those who reflect the culture they were born and raised into.  We can disagree with them all day long, but we err in pretending the "American way" is "better".  We can't prove its' better except to shake our fist on Sunday and hear the claps of other people who already agree with us.  That doesn't prove the American way is objectively good.

The facts of the matter are that the Canaanites, whom God’s people were to destroy, were destroyed for their wickedness (Deuteronomy 9:4; 18:9-12; Leviticus 18:24-25,27-28).

John H. Walton (PhD, Hebrew Union College) is professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College and Graduate School.  He is author of The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites" (IVP Academic, 2017).  Therein he insists

Proposition # 12: The depiction of the Canaanites In Leviticus and Deuteronomy is a sophisticated appropriation of a common ANE literary device.  Not an Indictment.

In other words, on the basis of the case made by Walton and Sandy, my becoming a genuinely born again Christian AND graduating from a Christian college AND conducting extensive review of fundamentalist Christian treatments of the Canaanite problem could easily still leave me thinking the fundamentalist view is incorrect. 

Now if becoming spiritually alive doesn't do anything to help me correctly understand God's justice, I'm not going to think becoming spiritually alive is anything deeper or more significant than a description of a purely  naturalistic process.

Miller continues:

Canaanite culture and religion in the second millennium B.C. were polluted, corrupt, and perverted.

Sorry, you don't have any archaeological evidence that any of them ever practiced bestiality with anywhere near the consistency that fundamentalist apologist typically accuse them of.  Instead, you read the ancient and politically biased accounts by the Israelites, and automatically assume these are just as easily understood and reliable as yesterday's headline in the San Francisco Chronicle.

No doubt the people were physically diseased from their illicit behavior.

The fact that the Israelites were so easily swayed into such idolatry on nearly ever page of the Pentateuch tells me your argument about who 'deserved' to be slaughtered is superficial.  If God was correct to slaughter the Canaanites, then since the Israelites were no better, they "deserved" to be slaughtered likewise.

If God could live with the Israelites who were just as bad (James 2:10-11), he could have lived with the Canaanites.

There simply was no viable solution to their condition except destruction.

Then I apparently know your bible better than you.  God could have just waved his magic wand and convinced all Canaanites to do whatever he wanted them to do.  See Ezra 1:1.

Their moral depravity was “full” (Genesis 15:16).

Yup, you aren't addressing skeptics, you are only concerned with the readers who automatically conclude "historically reliable!" every time they read something in the bible.  Perhaps that explains why your arguments here give skeptics little reason to worry about anything except their next beer.

They had slumped to such an immoral, depraved state, with no hope of recovery, that their existence on this Earth had to be terminated—just like in Noah’s day when God waited while Noah preached for years, but was unable to turn the world’s population from its wickedness (Genesis 6:3,5-7; 1 Peter 3:20; 2 Peter 3:5-9).

Nope, Ezra 1:1, God has a non-barbaric way of turning people from the error of their way...therefore his choice to solve the problem in an unnecessarily barbaric way means nothing less than what's implied when a parent puts a bullet in their child's brain to make them stop disobeying.  The fact that the parent had other options, is all we need to be reasonable to conclude that parent is evil and guilty.  Telling us that God is always a special exception and his ways are mysterious, etc, cannot be viewed as plausible unless and until some hardcore undisputed evidence of his actual existence is brought forward, lest we  find ourselves doing nothing more than making excuses for story characters.  I'm an atheist.  You aren't going to be bringing in any evidence of god's actual existence.

Including the children in the destruction of such populations actually spared them from a worse condition—that of being reared to be as wicked as their parents and thus face eternal punishment.

Which is the precise argument I use to prove that abortion is morally good.  How could it be morally bad to send a child to heaven in a way that protects them from the possibility of ending up in hell?  Isn't the spiritual perspective (going to heaven) more important than the earthly perspective (unlawful to kill)?  When we remember the bible god takes credit for all murders anyway (Deuteronomy 32:29), then we can know it is God who is causing a woman to get an abortion.

So if God cannot do anything morally bad, then is it morally good when God employs his Deut. 32:39 power, yes or no?

When you say God can orchestrate our sinful acts for his own good purposes without himself thereby becoming guilty of sin, you are clearly desperate to grasp at any stupid trifle nobody in their right mind would ever grasp at, to avoid admitting the god of the OT is nothing but an accurate reflection of the barbaric culture that created him. There is no possible reasoning that can justify the argument that you encouraged a person to commit a criminal act, but you yourself bear no moral responsibility for the criminal act.  If older brother James encourages younger brother Dennis to steal a candy bar from a store, does James bear any moral responsibility for this crime, yes or no?

All persons who die in childhood, according to the Bible, are ushered to Paradise and will ultimately reside in Heaven.

Well in any moral analysis, where the result of the act is morally good, the act itself was morally good (i.e, healthy kids because you made them eat healthy food).

If the result of the moral act is morally good, you are a fool to say the act itself could nevertheless be immoral, since the good result is precisely the reason to say the act producing the good, was itself good.  How do you know feeding kids healthy food is morally good?  The result.  That's sufficiently objective to make it reasonable for moral relativists to feel their actions morally justified, even if absolute morals don't exist. You will say "this is merely 'the ends justify the means' !", but that doesn't bother me, as ends-justify-the-means is a rather popular moral justification.  If I'm starving, I won't just look at somebody else's food and perish away, I'll probably try to get some of it even if I know this is stealing.

Children who have parents who are evil must naturally suffer innocently while on Earth (e.g., Numbers 14:33).

But only because your god chose to refrain from waving his magic Ezra 1:1 wand and causing those evil parents to do whatever he wants.

Those who disagree with God’s annihilation of the wicked in the Old Testament have the same liberal attitude that has come to prevail in America just in the last half century. That attitude has typically opposed capital punishment, as well as the corporal punishment of children.

Then count me out.  I'm not  fundamentalist Christian, but I'm not a card carrying ACLU radical.

Such people simply cannot see the rightness of evildoers being punished by execution or physical pain.

Said the Muslim terrorist leader to his followers when talking about the moral goodness of killing Americans.

Nevertheless, their view is skewed—and the rest of us are being forced to live with the results of their warped thinking: undisciplined, out-of-control children are wreaking havoc on our society by perpetrating crime to historically, all-time high levels.

And like the parent who has the ability to control the kids without killing or brutalizing them, God just sits around refusing to exercise his Ezra 1:1 magic.  So God is like the wealthy parent watching their own kids starve, because dad refuses, solely by choice, to withdraw money from the bank to buy food.  When you have ability and opportunity to prevent your own created situation from spinning out of moral control, and you don't, the evil that occurs is YOUR fault whether others can be implicated too. 

God is no different than the mother with three toddlers who constantly chooses to never guide them, and just lets them run all over hell and back, then bitches about the fact that they exhibit the natural characteristics of unguided children.  Or like the mother who never guides her kids by anything more than words.  Sorry god, "words" are not enough, thus "the bible says..." is not enough to solve actual real world problems, even if it's enough to dazzle the delights of believers every Sunday.

Those who reject the ethics of God’s destructive activity in the Old Testament, to be consistent, must reject Jesus and the New Testament.

Nah, plenty of genuinely born again Christians have had severe probelms with the moral contradiction between the OT and NT.  I therefore reasonably deduce it is a real problem and not merely a case of somebody lacking spiritual insight.

Over and over again, Jesus and the New Testament writers endorsed and defended such activity (e.g., Luke 13:1-9; 12:5; 17:29-32; 10:12; Hebrews 10:26-31).

Yup, you aren't arguing to convince skeptics, but only to convince "bible-believers".  Dismissed.

The Bible provides the only logical, sensible, meaningful, consistent explanation regarding the principles of retribution, punishment, and the conditions under which physical life may be extinguished.

Yup.  We'd all cry if America's ghettos were nuked clean, but I'm sure you'd probably find a bible verses that says nuking the ghettos is the "only way" an infinite god of infinite powers could  possibly solve the problem.

How NOT to concisely argue for a Traditional view of Jesus' childhood, a reply to Jason Engwer

This is my reply to a Triablogue article by Jason Engwer entitled

How To Concisely Argue For A Traditional View Of Jesus' Childhood

Monday, December 09, 2019

Engwer, true to form, once again choose to pay attention to meaningless trifles.

Engwer is forced to agree with his apostle Paul that to disprove the resurrection of Jesus is to turn Christians into false witnesses who are still in their sins, 1st Corinthians 15:15 (which then means they deserve the death penalty even if they do real miracles in support of their theology, Deut. 13).  Since I have demolished Jesus' resurrection by showing that the naturalistic theory has more explanatory scope and power, I must conclude that arguing about Jesus' childhood can never be sufficient to fix the wormwood infecting Christianity's linchpin doctrine.

I therefore only answer Engwer point by point on Jesus' childhood solely out of my preference to demolish fundamentalist Christianity in all its forms, not because of any stupid worry that justifying the canonical Nativity stories somehow makes Christianity worthy of the slightest credence. 

There are a lot of ways to argue for a traditional view of the childhood of Jesus, and we've been making those arguments for a long time. But it's often helpful to be able to argue concisely for what you believe. That can be hard to do when a subject is as large and complicated as the earliest years of Jesus' life.

Actually, its not complicated at all.  The gospel authors say nearly nothing about Jesus' childhood, likely because they knew that trying to convince the public that some infant crapping his diaper was the creator of the universe just sounded a bit too stupid even for pre-literate religious fanatics, and most people would more readily accept divine-man claims if the person at issue was at least an adult.  By limiting Jesus' miracles to some life-point past his infancy, stupid shit questions about how a baby could be god and yet still not have control of his own bowel movements are conveniently avoided.

For example, to say that Jesus was the creator is to imply that he never sinned.  A child who never disobeys his parents?   How believable is that?  Since people who believe in miracles don't always think the most outlandish things, it appears the gospel authors, despite willingness to tell miracle stories, still recognize that some miracle stories can go too far.  The mark of a good professional liar is that they know where employing circumspection will cause their story to "ring" more true.

We are addressing years of his life, after all, unlike the narrower focus of Easter, for example. But here are a few summary arguments I recommend using:

If you paid more attention to what Jesus actually told you to do, you would have no time to engage in the sin of word-wrangling (2nd Timothy 2:14).  The very fact that Paul showed zero interest in Jesus' childhood should be enough to prove that Paul doesn't think anything is missing by simply leaving Jesus' childhood completely alone.  So your desire to engage in such debate anyway is reasonably construed to signify your lack of satisfaction with Paul's gospel.  But again, if you spent more time doing what Jesus and Paul demanded of their followers, not only would you have no time to spend on debatable pionts, but your obedience to clear commands would make it more likely your efforts would reap spirtiual reward.  you cannot really say whether God gives a fuck whether you say anything about Jesus' childhood or not.  Clearly, you have a morbid interest in controversial questions, the trait that apostle Paul said renders you a stupid heretic (1st Timothy 6:4).

The NT authors never made Jesus' childhood that big of a deal, so you run a significant risk of trying to do better than your god by attempting to satisfy public curiosity about a subject that your god did not see fit to provide any answers to.

Furthermore, if you believe Matthew was written to non-Christian as well as Christian Jews, you get in more trouble, since that would mean that Matthew, the alleged apostle and author, seriously thought that a mere story about Jesus' childhood should "suffice" to "convince" non-Christain Jews, showing your Matthew to be far more anti-intellectual than you'd ever dare credit to him.

You cannot say Matthew would have been there to explain the story, as the patristic evidence, that you treat as infallible without honestly admitting it, says Matthew wrote the gospel to make up for his absence given his intent to leave Jerusalem and travel abroad:

Eusebius, Hist.Eccl. 3:24
Nevertheless, of all the disciples of the Lord, only Matthew and John have left us written memorials, and they, tradition says, were led to write only under the pressure of necessity. For Matthew, who had at first preached to the Hebrews, when he was about to go to other peoples, committed his Gospel to writing in his native tongue, and thus compensated those whom he was obliged to leave for the loss of his presence. 

 [1] Schaff, Chrysostom, Homily on Matthew 1

Of Matthew again it is said, that when those who from amongst the Jews had believed came to him, and besought him to leave to them in writing those same things, which he had spoken to them by word, he also composed his Gospel in the language of the Hebrews. And Mark too, in Egypt, is said to have done this self-same thing at the entreaty of the disciples.

This is quite sufficient to allege that what we find in Matthew's Nativity story is what Matthew preached.  It is also likely that beacuse the gospel followed Matthew's preaching, the written nativity story is likely a polished form of that preaching, so that the written form provides more details than Matthew's oral preaching did.  he was an anti-intellectual.  John was the same way, he expected faith to just magically materialize in the hearts of his readers merely because they read his words (Matthew 20:31).

- Reliable sources on Jesus' childhood were available to the early Christians and their opponents for a long time.

Mary allegedly had visions.  So since Christian apologists never attempt to justify visionary material in the NT, even they agree that when a source is a 'vision', it can be safely discounted.

Close relatives of Jesus lived for more than half a century after his birth.

Which only hurts your cause, as those relatives found nothing in Jesus' public ministry to convince them Jesus was a truly divine person, see Mark 3:21, Mark 6:4 and John 7:5.  You have no interest whatsoever in evaluating the testimony of these alleged eyewitnesses to Jesus' alleged "miracles".  Your other comments that perhaps they were too overcome with jealousy, or they "just didn't understand" are too foolish to deserve comment.  What the fuck would even a stupid person do, if their brother was going around town raising the dead and curing diseases science still deemed incurable?

For a discussion of the credibility of the early reports about Jesus' relatives in general, see here. Regarding how long individuals like Mary and James lived, see here and here.

In the first linked article, you say "He had siblings, and they were initially unbelievers." That's an understatement.  Those siblings committed the unpardonable sin (Mark 3:21, to say somebody was insane was to accuse them of demon possession, see John 8:52, 10:20) and even after a full year into Jesus' public ministry, his brothers were refusing to believe in him and mocking his ability to do miracles (John 7:1-5).  Worse, Jesus himself testified after coming home from his first preaching tour that his own relatives did not properly honor him (Mark 6:4).  In all fairness, though, in the first linked article you admit:

Furthermore, some of the gospel accounts are particularly unlikely to have been fabricated, because of their embarrassing nature. Jesus' mother and brothers refer to Him as insane (Mark 3:20-35), Jesus considers His unbelieving brothers (future church leaders) incompetent to care for His mother (John 19:26-27), etc. John 19:27 tells us that Mary lived past Jesus' death for some unspecified period of time as well, which is corroborated by Acts 1:14 (which, like John 19, has Mary in the region of Jerusalem around the time of Jesus' death).

And I couldn't agree more.  The embarrassing nature of these admissions gives them slightly more historical likelihood than statements that Jesus did real miracles or was the son of god.  Engwer continues:

And those relatives held some prominent positions in the early church, as we see in Acts,

I'm not seeing anything in Acts that definitively puts a relative of Jesus in a prominent place.  Two Jameses were original apostles (Mark 3:17-18), so when two Jameses appear in Acts 1, the more likely truth is that these were the same exact men, and since neither of them can possibly have been the James the brother of the Lord (i.e., he was son of Joseph and thus not a son of 'Zebedee' or son of 'Alphaeus'), and most Christian apologists say the specific brother of Jesus named James was among the relatives in Mark 3:21 who rejected Jesus' message before the crucifixion, therefore, neither James in Acts 1 can be James the brother of Jesus.

Yes, there is an unqualified James in Acts 15, but since there were two different Jameses who were original apostles (supra), saying the James of Acts 15 was one of the original apostles with the same name requires less ad hoc speculation than the hopeful theory that the James of Acts 15 was specifically Jesus' brother.

Galatians 1:19, 2:9-12,

No, inerrantist Christian scholar George, T. admitted that Galatians 1:19 is ambiguous as to whether Paul was saying James the Lord's brother was one of the apostles.  George says:

1:19 Paul claimed that he saw none of the other apostles except James, the brother of Jesus. The expression is ambiguous in Greek, so we cannot be sure whether Paul meant to include James among the other apostles.  Did he mean: “The only other apostle I saw was James,” or “I saw no other apostle, although I did see James”? Probably he meant something like this: “During my sojourn with Peter, I saw none of the other apostles, unless you count James, the Lord’s brother.”

(2001, c1994). New American Commentary, Vol. 30: Galatians,  p. 74)

The James of Galatians 2:9 ff is at least 15 verses away from 1:19, so it clearly isn't close enough to justify pretending that Paul was talking about the same exact person, he could just as likely have been referring simply to another apostle James whose headship of the Jerusalem church did not need to be specified.  But I would argue that because Paul refers to Peter (Cephas) James and John (2:9), it is most reasonable to assume these men achieved leadership in the Jerusalem church because they were previously among Jesus' inner circle, the precise type of apostles most likely to attain a high leadership position. See Mark 5:37, 13:3 and Matthew 17:1, 9).  The reasonableness of this interpretation is not going to disappear merely because there are other bare possibilities.  However,

Engwer continues:

1 Corinthians 9:5,

First, the mere fact that early church fathers debated whether Jesus had multiple brothers is itself enough to justify the person who says 1st Cor. 9:5 is too ambiguous to think it can yield conclusions of reasonable certainty.  See here.

Second, Paul distinguishes the "rest of the apostles" from the "brothers of the Lord".  This is naturally expected if Paul felt Jesus' brothers did not qualify as apostles, and merely sometimes accompanied the apostles during missions.

Third, Mark 6:3 lists 4 brothers of Jesus, James being one, so that the plural "brothers" in 1st Corinthians 9:5 would still be accurate even if we asserted one specifc brother, James, never converted to Christian faith.

Fourth, the mere fact that the head apostles gave Paul the 'right hand of fellowship' (Galatians 2:9) need not imply those apostles agreed with Paul's gospel, so that even if 1st Cor. 9:5 proves that James the brother of Christ sometimes accompanied other apostles on missions, his presence in such context doesn't demand that he was a convert to Christianity.  In the mid-40's there was a terrible famine in and around Palestine, and the Jerusalem apostles could very well have viewed Paul as a meal-ticket and that's the only reason they pretended to support his version of the gospel (though it is weird that in Gal. 2:9, they allocate the entire Gentile mission field to Paul and confine themselves solely to Jews,  when in fact the risen Christ allegedly said THEY were to evangelize the Gentiles (Matthew 28:19).

Fifth, other historical "facts" about James the Lord's brother show that he did not agree with Paul's theology, he was a Judaizer and likely for that reason was held in high esteem among non-Christian law-observant Jews, which would hardly be the case if this exact James preached the same message Jesus did, you know, the one that incurred the wrath of the Jewish people (Matthew 12:14, 27:25).

the letters of James and Jude, etc.

There is nothing about the authorship of James' epistle that suggests he was specifically a brother of Jesus, and there were two original apostles of Christ named James whose authorship could just as easily account for that epistle's echoing some of Christ's alleged sayings.  I would argue their aurthorship is ore likely than by James the brother of Christ since they spent three years with Jesus before he died, whereas the brother of Jesus name James was a late-comer, so that naturally either of the two original apostles of the same name are more likely to have more familiarity with Jesus' sayings.

For both epistle of James and epistle of Jude, it is quite difficult to believe, in light of Jesus granting specific authority to certain apostles (Matthew 16:18), and in light of Paul's admission that the early Christian laity recognized certain apostles as authoritative (Galatians 2:6), and in light of Peter's belief that only TWELEVE men could possibly be legitimate apostles (Acts 1, his seeing a need to replace Judas with Matthias), that the authors, if they are true apostles, would fail, as they do, to specify their authority and position.  1st Peter starts out with the author declaring he is an "apostle", 2nd Peter doesn't matter because it is reasonably construed a forgery despite the trifles of fundamentalists otherwise, and Paul is always identifying himself as an apostle and authority.   Yet James and Jude place themselves at the level of other Christians by declaring themselves "bond-servants" of Christ (James 1:1, Jude 1:1).  The reasonableness of saying the true authors were not the leaders bearing those names, but lesser persons who either had the same names, or wrote what they thought such leaders would have written, is not going to disappear merely because other authorship theories are also within the realm of viable possibility.

Keep in mind that Jesus' relatives were critical of him at times, so his enemies would have had an interest in and ability to get information about his background from those relatives.

Agreed.  Which probably accounts for why we have no surviving records from the 1st century of those hostile to Jesus.  When the enemies can use Jesus' family against him, us Christians must "destroy the memory of Amalek from under heaven..."  Paul wanted to 'stop' the mouths of Jewish Christians who were teachings things he didn't approve of, see Titus 1:11.  That's not calling for democratic debate, and its not asking those listening to the jewish Christians to "check out" Paul's competing claims, that's asking for the Jewish Christian assertions to cease circulation altogether.

Some of Jesus' neighbors, coworkers, and contemporaries in places like Bethlehem and Nazareth also would have lived past the time of his death, even for decades in some cases. The same is true of the religious authorities and others who opposed him and had him executed. Just as the early Christians passed on information from generation to generation, so did their enemies. The early Christians and their opponents produced many documents in the earliest decades of Christianity, not just the ones we possess today, as I argue here.

 Except that it is also reasonable to conclude that the Judaizers wrote letters critical of Paul (their ability to convince Peter and "even Barnabas" (Galatians 2) might suggest the case for the Judaizer gospel is more powerful than what you can tell from mirror-reading Galatians and Acts 15), yet we have no such thing from the 1st century.

And see here for some comments from Larry Hurtado about how the literacy of the early Christians is often underestimated.

Many of Paul's converts were illiterate (1st Corinthians 1:26).  perhaps you will argue that the Greek word for "many" need only mean "two".

- We have a lot of evidence for a traditional view of Jesus' childhood.

The significance of which is completely debunked by Jesus' own complete apathy toward and silence on his own childhood, as if he was of the belief that what happened in his childhood had no significant bearing on his claim to the Messiah.  Add to this the fact that 25 of the 27 NT books show zero concern for events in Jesus' childhood, and you are a fool to insist that skeptics are somehow intellectually obligated to give two shits about these speculations that you just cannot resist wasting your time with.  Then again, Jason Engwer thinks it is proper use of God's money to help digitize and preserve the audiotapes of the Enfield Poltergeist, which according to his bible constitutes using god's money to preserve records of the manifestations of demon activity.  We can safely assume Engwer is so fanatical in his desire to prove bible inerrancy and apologetics, he ends up often contradicting the bible.

I don't think the evidence supporting a traditional view of Jesus' childhood is consistent, for example, Luke 2:52 doesn't say Jesus' human nature increased in wisdom, it says "Jesus" increased in wisdom, and it is eisogesis to read the orthodox resolution to the Arian and Nestorian "heresies" back into the earlier text, when it is more objective to prioritize the author's own context.  If that requires that Luke was saying all parts of Jesus (i.e., both divine and human) grew in wisdom, that will only bother fundamentalist Christians, skeptics will not worry too much that this makes for a bad day in classical theism-land.  Let's just say that the average person of the first century appears to have believed, in rather uncritical unquestioning way, that the gods could take on human form, Acts 14:11.  The point is that these kinds of statements make the historical Jesus so utterly unbelievable that what one might "prove" from his childhood is absurdly irrelevant.

Much of what the early Christians report about the childhood of Jesus meets modern historical standards, like multiple attestation,

First, multiple attestation is a weak criteria, it assumes that if you have at least two witnesses who agree on a fact, the jury has no choice but to consider the fact established.  That's just stupid, especially in the first century where thousands of Christians testified in favor of the "fact" that Paul was hypocritical in his preaching (Acts 21:20) and is therefore an example of how even today's Christian apologists will quickly dismiss multiply-attested "facts".  How many thousands of witnesses testify to Roman Catholic miracles at Fatima and elsewhere?  Engwer will trifle that he doesn't deny their miraculous nature but only the conclusion that God approves of Roman Catholicism, but that misses the point:  God's approval of Roman Catholicism is ALSO what's multiply attested in such modern-day miracles.  That is, Engwer will find it impossibly difficult to continue parading multiple attestation as the final nail in the skeptic's conffin.  If he dares attempt to look objective by pretending he doesn't necessarily always believe miracles merely because they are multiply attested, then he cannot blame skeptics who, like him, cite other evidentiary shortcomings in a claim and its evidence which they feel are greater than its "multiple attestation".

Second, Matthean priority is also meets multiple attestation in the church fathers, but most Christian scholars insist in Markan priority.  Matthew's authorship of the gospel now bearing his name is also multiply attested in the patristic literature, but because it appears the latter fathers are basically all merely echoing the Papias-tradition, such multiple attestation is more correctly characterized is mere echoing, not independent corroboration.

Third, multiple attestation barely operates here in the debate about Jesus' childhood:  you only have two accounts.  You are not going to place intellectual compulsion on skeptics by trifling about John 1:13 and Mark 6:3.  The very fact that no other NT author finds Jesus-childhood- stories edifying enough to warrant mention would justify the view that the earliest apostles were not in agreement on whether the virgin birth story was true (they would have to agree that if true, it would certainly do as much to support their claims about Jesus as do their own unique claims about the miracles he did in adulthood).   So the silence of most NT authors on the virgin birth remains significant.  That's not going to disappear merely because you can always posit some other possibility to explain such silence such as "maybe they knew their audience accepted it so it didn't need to be repeated".

the criterion of embarrassment,

Which justifies skepticism in the case of Mark 3:21, 6:4 and John 7:5.  Then again, Matthew and Luke obviously weren't "apologetics" by any stretch, and their fallacy of argument by assertion (i.e., preaching to the choir) might warrant the conclusion they were written only for believers, in which case, the authors would not think their tales of Jesus' nativity were "embarrassing", so that such tales do not "pass" the criteria of embarrassment.

and the criterion of coherence.

Nah, that's just another way for you to say "bible inerrancy".  Plenty of scholars find real discrepancies between the gospels, including Mike Licona, who remains unimpressed with Lydia McGrew's sin of word-wrangling.

For some examples, see here and here.
 - There's a significant lack of support in the ancient sources for skeptical alternatives to a traditional Christian view of the childhood of Jesus.

First, not if common sense is allowed in.  If Jesus' human vocal cords necessarily implicated his divine nature when he spoke a phrase that many conservative Christian scholars don't think he actually spoke (John 8:58), then there is nothing necessarily fallacious in saying Jesus' human acts implicated his divine nature, in which case it follows with equal logic that when the baby Jesus' mouth was spilling slobber, his was also implicating his divine nature (i.e., the creator of the universe slobbered).  The logic of the incarnate logos does not allow desperate Trinintarians to decree which acts of the human Jesus implicated his divine nature and which didn't.  Any such attempt would be necessarily arbitrary.  Jesus' human nature never implicates his divine nature, where doing so would overturn your cherished doctrine of classical theism.

Second, thanks for indicating that you don't think the argument from silence is always fallacious.

Third, you are assuming that the Christian claims in the early period would have so interested skeptics as to not only prompt them to research Jesus' childhood, but to publish the results in a way that would have survived the next few centuries in which Christian leaders insisted on burning "heretical" books which disagreed with orthodox doctrine.  In truth Jesus was at best a local miscreant whom history would have nearly completely forgotten had it not been for the efforts of his fanatics to keep his memory alive.  Jesus was not such a big deal in his own lifetime nor in the lifetime of Paul for anybody outside that religion to give two fucks about documenting facts about Jesus' childhood in a way likely to survive the burn barrels of the next 4 centuries.  25 of the 27 NT books make absolutely zero effort to preserving Jesus' childhood events for posterity.  The fundamentalist is going to spin that silence in a way that foists any intellectual obligation on a skeptic to either agree or admit being unreasonable.

Fourth, our knowledge of the early Christian sects that denied Jesus' divinity and virgin birth are limited to church fathers who always embellished their descriptions of the sects with hateful vitriol, justifying a degree of hesitancy before blindly accepting all negative slurs therein as objective unbiased historical truth.

Justin Martyr describes some such Christians.  Dialogue, Chapter XLVIII

For there are some, my friends,” I said, “of our race,150 who admit that He is Christ, while holding Him to be man of men; with whom I do not agree, nor would I,151 even though most of those who have [now] the same opinions as myself should say so; since we were enjoined by Christ Himself to put no faith in human doctrines,152 but in those proclaimed by the blessed prophets and taught by Himself.
150 Some read, “of your race,” referring to the Ebionites. Maranus believes the reference is to the Ebionites, and supports in a long note the reading “our,” inasmuch as Justin would be more likely to associate these Ebionites with Christians than with Jews, even though they were heretics.
151 Langus translates: “Nor would, indeed, many who are of the same opinion as myself say so.”
152 [Note this emphatic testimony of primitive faith.]
Roberts, A., Donaldson, J., & Coxe, A. C. (1997). The Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol.I : Translations of the writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325. The apostolic fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems.

Irenaeus A.H. Book 3, ch. XI:

For the Ebionites, who use Matthew’s Gospel¹⁴¹ only, are confuted out of this very same, making false suppositions with regard to the Lord.

141 Harvey thinks that this is the Hebrew Gospel of which Irenaeus speaks in the opening of this book; but comp. Dr. Robert’s Discussions on the Gospels, part ii. chap. iv.Roberts, A., Donaldson, J., & Coxe, A. C. (1997). The Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol.I : Translations of the writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325. The apostolic fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems.

Obviously Engwer has forgotten that the views of the Ebionites count as "ancient".  Engwer will trifle that the Ebiontes are not as early as the the gospels of Matthew and Luke, but he doesn't actually know that.  All he knows is that references to the Ebionites are later than the gospels, he cannot establish that they originated in the 2nd century.  Furthermore, most Christian scholars date Matthew and Luke to about to 80 a.d. or even later, which means those who denied the virgin birth wouldn't be doing so until late 1st century.  Gene Bridges from Triablogue apparently thinks the Ebionites of the 2nd century were the outgrowth of the Judaizers present at the Council of Jerusalem:

And as matter of fact, we can see that the Judaizers of the First Century are the very ones who turn into Ebionites of the second order later on. That's what the conflict that the Jerusalem Council recorded in Acts was meant to address. (link here).

So it remains reasonable, even if not infallible, to infer that the Judaizers of the Council of Jerusalem were not merely demanding Gentile circumcision, but were also denying Jesus' divinity and virgin birth. I defy anyone to dare attempt to show that the specifically Jewish Christians believed Jesus to be god manifest in the flesh.

Dr. James Tabor, Professor of ancient Judaism and early Christianity, thinks the Ebionites were the original followers of Jesus, see here, so the position adopted in responsible scholarship must remain reasonable despite Engwer's ceaseless trifles otherwise.

Eusebius significantly says that while Ebionites could not get some Christians to agree with all they believed, they were successful in getting such Christians to adopt other forms of "heresy", so that the Ebionites position, could be sustained against rebuttal to some degree, that is, the "heresy" had some teeth to it and wasn't just the casual unthinking uncritical happenstance conjuring up of doctrine that Engwer seems to think characterizes everything christian alternative he doesn't agree with:

Eusebius, church history, Book 3, ch. 27

The Heresy of the Ebionites 

The evil demon, however, being unable to tear certain others from their allegiance to the Christ of God, yet found them susceptible in a different direction, and so brought them over to his own purposes. The ancients quite properly called these men Ebionites, because they held poor and mean opinions concerning Christ. For they considered him a plain and common man, who was justified only because of his superior virtue, and who was the fruit of the intercourse of a man with Mary. In their opinion the observance of the ceremonial law was altogether necessary, on the ground that they could not be saved by faith in Christ alone and by a corresponding life. There were others, however, besides them, that were of the same name, but avoided the strange and absurd beliefs of the former, and did not deny that the Lord was born of a virgin and of the Holy Spirit. But nevertheless, inasmuch as they also refused to acknowledge that he pre-existed, being God, Word, and Wisdom, they turned aside into the impiety of the former, especially when they, like them, endeavored to observe strictly the bodily worship of the law. These men, moreover, thought that it was necessary to reject all the epistles of the apostle, whom they called an apostate from the law; and they used only the so-called Gospel according to the Hebrews and made small account of the rest. The Sabbath and the rest of the discipline of the Jews they observed just like them, but at the same time, like us, they celebrated the Lord's days as a memorial of the resurrection of the Saviour. Wherefore, in consequence of such a course they received the name of Ebionites, which signified the poverty of their understanding. For this is the name by which a poor man is called among the Hebrews.  

Engwer continues:

For example, the early opponents of Christianity not only don't seem to have opposed the Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus, but even corroborated it.

The evidence that Jesus stayed dead is overwhelming, whether he was "really" born in Bethlehem is something I couldn't give a shit about.

Not only does Celsus not agree with the popular modern notion that the virgin birth claim didn't arise until decades after Jesus' death, but he even attributes the claim of a virgin birth to Jesus himself (in Origen, Against Celsus, 1:28). See here for a further discussion of how inconsistent many modern skeptical views of the virgin birth are with ancient non-Christian sources.

Well gee, apostle Paul was "inconsistent" with the Judaizer gospel.  How ancient is the Judaizer gospel, and do you personally give a fuck? No.  Then quit being a hypocrite and pretending the ancient Christian sources YOU favor are somehow more deserving of credence.

Secondly, if Justin attributes the virgin birth claim to Jesus himself, sounds like your star church father had a nasty habit of drawing inferences from the canonical NT that it could not logically support.  Sure is funny that you don't really care how "heretical" your own church fathers were when they say something that supports your particular view.

For more examples of what ancient non-Christian sources said about Jesus' childhood, see here.

I believe there is basic historicity to the nativity stories (when Jesus was born, the family had to move around), I simply assert that they do indeed justify the charge of tension or contradiction, and of course I always use Mark 3:21, Mark 6:4, John 7:5 and other arguments to justify the conclusion that the miraculous portions of the nativity stories are total bullshit.  For example:  most Christian scholars understand Mary to be among the family members who in Mark 3:21 conclude Jesus is "insane" and try to publicly arrest him.    Minority scholars who trifle that Mark 3:21 isn't talking about Jesus family might exist, but do not render unreasonable the skeptics who side with the majority of Christian scholars and apologists on the matter.  And even if we forget Mark 3:21, the hatred Jesus' family had toward him during his alleged "miracle ministry' is still clear from Mark 6:4 and John 7:5, texts that apologists cannot get rid of with trifles about errant translation.

Engwer himself sees James being skeptical of Jesus in Mark 3:21, see here, so I'm not seeing what explosion of exegetical dishonesty anybody would allege is involved in my seeing Jesus' mother in the same verse, a conclusion held by most Christian scholars, including conservatives.

It doesn't matter if excuses can be made to "explain" how Mark 3:21 can be harmonized with the Nativity stories (i.e., maybe Mary experienced amnesia after the visions, etc), it is reasonable to conclude that any woman who experienced the divine confirmations alleged in the Nativity stories would not likely ever conclude that her son was "insane" unless she saw later proof that he prior visions were mere delusion.  Such is not probable, and probability is the key to historicity.  Unless apologists can show that Mary's later becoming forgetful, dismissive or apathetic toward her prior alleged visionary experience is MORE LIKELY than her continuing to trust that it was real, the skeptical position derived from Mark 3:21 will continue being reasonable.

And since they lived in an honor/shame society, the fact that Jesus' immediate family intended to publicly "arrest" him (Mark 3:21) reasonably implies that they had inquired diligently into his claims to make sure they were not basing their shaming behavior on a mistaken notion.  So if they intended to actually arrest him, they more than likely didn't reach that conclusion willy-nilly but only after robust discussion they decided that lesser means would be insufficient.  That is, apologists cannot reasonably charge Jesus' family with impulsiveness or stupidity, as that would then have consequences when such apologists later assert that some of Jesus' stupid impulsive family became leaders in the early church.  Once again, Mary's desire to arrest a son she concluded was "insane" is reasonably viewed as irreconcilable with her having experienced real divine visions while pregnant with Jesus that allegedly confirmed he was the son of God.  "Maybe she just forgot about those when she wanted to arrest Jesus" does not foist an intellectual compulsion on a skeptic, whatsoever, and of course, the paucity of NT evidence on Mary makes it impossible to "argue" that Mary's skepticism of Jesus in Mark 3:21 resulted from some type of mental or psychological imperfection.

The family's desire to arrest Jesus also reasonably justifies the assumption that they didn't experience anything about Jesus in his childhood that would have tipped them off that he is a divine being.  Yet if we are to believe Jesus was god, that necessarily implies that Jesus never, between birth and age 30, sinned.  How many Jews in the first century believed that a regular human being could avoid committing sin for the first 30 years of their life?  So if the Nativity stories were true, the mother of Jesus in Mark 3:21 wasn't just desiring to dishonor her son, but desiring to dishonor that son despite her having noticed that Jesus never sinned in his 30 years.  Now what, Engwer?  Was Mary just high on crack when she concluded Jesus was insane and tried to have him arrested? 

The brothers continuing to persist in unbelief toward Jesus as late as the completion of the first third of his public ministry (John 7:5) is also reasonably interpreted to mean that those brothers did not see anything in Jesus' alleged "miracles" that justified drawing the conclusion that he was the true son of god.  And since John 7:5 passes the criteria of embarrassment, it has greater likelihood of being true, than the laudatory statements in the gospel that Jesus performed miracles.

On the modern skeptical assertion that Luke's census account is radically inaccurate, see this post.

Nothing about my skepticism is affected in the least by admitting that Luke got this right.  Only fools who see so much non-existence relevance to biblical inerrancy would waste their time trifling about this bullshit.

On modern skeptical claims about the authorship of the gospels, see here.

That link goes to a defense of Matthew's authorship of a gospel.  Your arguments are largely irrelevant to my skepticism of his authorship:  you cannot accuse a skeptic of being unreasonable to adopt the position that most Christian scholars adopt:  markan priority (Mark was the first gospel written, and Matthew extensively copies off of Mark).  Yet, I'm sure that as Christian apologists, you will blindly insist that any Christian scholarly theory that happens to also help the skeptical case, is "unreasonable".

Mark was not an eyewitness, Matthew allegedly was, so that's the first problem:  Matthew's use of mark is so extensive that it implies Matthew's author was far more ignorant about the details of Jesus life than Mark was, making it reasonable to conclude Matthew's author was not an eyewitness.  The reasonableness of that theory is not going to disappear merely because you can conjure up another reason, such as Matthew experiencing amnesia (unlikely given your completely gratuitous and unprovable theory that Matthew was inspired by God).  There are no other examples from the 1st century of an eyewitness relying this extensively on a non-eyewitness version of events.  Mike Licona also says apostolic authorship is the "fuzziest" in the case of Matthew and John, which thus prevents you from saying denial of Matthean authorship is "unreasonable".  Your ability to trifle about the patristic details does not suddenly convert Licona's position over to "unreasonable".  You are the one calling the Matthean authorship denial "unreasonable" so YOU have the burden to demonstrate that the denier's interpretation of the internal and external evidence is "unreasonable", and you are never going to do that, and you know it.  The more you condemn such Christian scholarly majority view, the more rational justification I have to conclude, as a skeptic, that serious study of the gospels does precisely nothing to increase the chances that my views of such matters will be reasonable, justifying the further conclusion that atheists who choose to disregard the gospels completely, are not doing anything except protecting themselves from plaguing their lives with ultimately pointless complexities and uncertainties.

Most Christian scholars think authentic Mark ends at 16:8, which makes it reasonable to conclude the earliest form of the gospel did not say a risen Christ actually appeared to anybody, making Matthew's resurrection appearance narrative less likely an "addition" and more likely an "embellishment", as most scholars agree Matthew was published after Mark, and embellishment is more normally found in the later accounts, not the earlier accounts.  Engwer will trifle like N.T. Wright that the various resurrection predictions in Mark scream out for the reader to insist on a resurrection appearance narrative ending that simply got lost.  Unfortunately, apologists never explain where they get this idea that if a gospel story character predicted something,  we are obligated to believe the gospel author added a fulfillment story about it to the gospel, even if the present canonical form of the gospel lacks such addendum.

Acts 1:3 says the risen Jesus spoke to the disciples things concerning the kingdom of God over a period of 40 days, which is reasonably construed to signify speech slightly more extensive than a 15-seconds worth of talking, even if it doesn't mean Jesus spoke like an auctioneer from 9 to 5 for each of those 40 days.  Yet in Matthew, the risen Christ's total words to the apostles take less than 15 seconds to speak.  

You will automatically say "compression!", but because the author of Matthew has such an extensive interest in both sayings of Christ in general, and "kingdom of God" Christ-sayings in particular, it is highly unlikely that such author would have knowingly "chosen to exclude" most of the kingdom-of-God statements which Acts 1:3 alleges the risen Christ uttered, and to instead compress it all down into a 15 second summary that does precisely nothing to guide the nascent church through the Judaizer controversy, despite the fact that even conservative dates for Matthew (50 a.d.) still place it after the Council of Jerusalem (49 a.d.).

There are many examples where Matthew expands on Mark in circumstances that increase the probability that Matthew is simply fabricating Christ sayings.  According to Mark, Peter's confession of Christ consisted of "thou art the Christ" and nothing more from Jesus on that occasion...but in the undeniably parallel account in Matthew, which is obviously talking about the same exact occasion, Peter's confession is longer and more theologically sophisticated, and is followed by what must have been a very important teaching from Christ about Peter's authority, Christ sayings that Mark's account also lacks.  See here.  Since inerrantists and fundies insist that Matthew is reporting what really happened, they are thrown into a dilemma because of Mark's shorter version:  If we must assume Mark's source was Peter, how likely is it that Peter would have said the fuller form of the confession now confined to Matthew, but only gave the shorter form to Mark?  How likely is it that Peter didn't tell Mark about Jesus' important authority-establishing statement, or that Mark knew about it but "chose to exclude" it?  What exact rule of hermeneutics or historiography is the skeptic violating by saying a person like Mark would not likely have "chosen to abbreviate" this kind of information?

All of this makes it reasonable to conclude that the reason the risen Christ in Matthew only gives 15 seconds worth of speech is because that's all the author thought this risen Christ had to say, not because the author is knowingly excluding such words through the artifice of "compression,  thus contradicting the 40-day period of risen Christ speeches alleged in Acts 1:3...a book that comes along LATER and is therefore the logical choice to blame for embellishment.

You will say Mark was based on Peter's preaching so Matthew was actually borrowing text from another apostle, but since it was already shown that Mark's version of Peter's confession is shorter than Matthew's, Matthew's dependence is more upon Mark than on Peter...who surely would have given to Mark all those extra details now confined to Matthew's account.

Finally, patristic accounts allege that Mark was writing for a Roman audience, so that if all else be true, Matthew was not merely relying on "Mark" or "Peter", he was relying on a version of Christ's sayings that Peter had adapted to his Roman audience...which is highly unlikely for the Matthew-author, whose gospel all scholars agree is the most intensely "Jewish" of the 4 canonical gospels.  What, did eyewitness Matthew RE-adapt the secondary Roman form of the the Christ-sayings for his Jewish audience?  Does that sound like somebody who was in a good position to have first-hand knowledge of Jesus' teachings?  Of course not, so then authorship of Matthew by the apostle of the same name, highly unlikely and profoundly irrelevant regardless.

And so on. As with the other two points above, you'd have to be selective in choosing one or more examples to illustrate the point, but we've provided many to choose from.
 To summarize these three points even further:
 1. the presence of reliable sources
2. the presence of evidence for a traditional Christian view
3. the absence of support for skeptical alternatives among the ancient sources
 And you could make it even easier to remember as: presence, presence, absence.
 The importance of these three points can be seen by thinking about how easily the relevant circumstances could have been different than they are and what implications would follow if they were different. What if individuals like Mary and James hadn't lived as long as they did, the earliest Christians hadn't shown so much interest in writing, etc.? What if there wasn't so much information about Jesus' childhood that meets the evidential standards for historically reliable material?

In light of the admissions of Christian scholars like Licona that Matthew wasn't as concerned about historical accuracy as inerrantists are, and in light of the fact that you don't have the first fucking clue how Matthew came up with the Nativity story material (if "how-it-could-have-been" scenarios work for you, you must accord that luxury to skepics also, to avoid charges of hypocrisy).

I'm not aware of any rule of historiography that says a person is intellectually compelled to give the benefit of the doubt to just whatever ancient document he looks at, until somebody comes along to prove it false.  That crap only started with Josh McDowell's dishonest reference to "Aristotle's dictum", but even if such initial trust is legitimate rule of historigraphy, so what?  How many historians say this benefit of the doubt must be given?  Mike Licona's admissions about how historians cannot even agree on methodology, reasonably justifies the conclusion that unless ancient words can be demonstrated to have relevance to the skeptic today, the skeptic cannot be unreasonable if they choose to completely ignore all things from ancient history...which is what the vast majority of people do their whole lives, except for religious fanatics and historians.

Refusing to give the benefit of the doubt to the document isn't like denying a law of physics, as historiography is an art, not a science.  Refusing to waste time learning what ancient authors had to say, can never be shown to result in the same level of disaster that looms over the person who chooses to disagree with the laws of logic, physics or math.  You'd have to show that a skeptic's disagreement with what most historians care about, makes the skeptic unreasonable, but then again, you don't think the skeptic unreasonable to dismiss from consideration the vast majority of ancient religious material.  It's only when we tell YOU to fuck off, that suddenly the only rational people in the world are those who give a fuck about ancient religious sources.

So if skeptics simply laugh at the NT and dismiss it, they aren't committing any academic "error", they are merely making life very hard for a few dipshits at Triablogue who themselves cannot even agree on what the bible teaches (Hays is a Calvinist, Engwer is not, etc).

Nevermind that there is no evidence, whatsoever, that anything stated in ancient history has any significance to modern-day people beyond one's personal preferences and intellectual curiosity.  If we were as objective about ancient history as christian apologists require, we'd never have time to investigate Christianity, because there are so many other possibly true religious claims from the ancient world, whose veracity we'd have to kindly presume true until they were proved false, an enterprise that would take a lifetime.

Gee, what rule of common sense, historiography or literary analysis dictates how long the skeptic should study a religious rooted in ancient claims, before the skeptic can be justified to start drawing ultimate conclusions about it?  Christian apologists will necessarily have to insist that it should take less than a lifetime, so that the skeptic can free up some time to bother with Christianity, but since there is no such rule, the amount of time the skeptic deems sufficient is a highly subjective affair and hence cannot be dicated by worried apologists at Triablogue who are guilty of the sin of ceaseless word-wrangling (2nd Timothy 2:14).

What if the early opponents of Christianity had made significantly different claims about Jesus' childhood, such as by corroborating the Christian claims much less than they did?

What if they did, and those records were destroyed just like thousands of other ancient christian writings?

What if most of the Arian bishops had shown up at the Council of Nicaea?  What if Constantine hadn't bribed anybody but bade them attend at their own expense?

What if the gospel alleged that Jesus sinned a few times during childhood?

 This approach I've outlined doesn't cover every issue, and you still have to address whatever objections are raised. It's a good way to start a discussion and summarize your view, even if it doesn't end the discussion.

And my rebuttal to you is a good way to show that skeptics are not being "unreasonable" in alleging that Jesus was an imperfect child whose history was embellished more than 50 years later, in a way that most NT authors did not seem sufficiently edifying to justify repeating, despite their willingness to repeat most of their issues.